1. Technical Field
Generally, the present disclosure relates to integrated circuits, and, more particularly, to adaptive temperature and power management of system-on-chip components.
2. Description of the Related Art
System-on-chip (SOC) approaches are commonly used in the art. SOCs comprise a plurality of components each of which requires power and generates heat. The temperature of each component at any given time depends on its power consumption at that time, as well as cross heating from nearby components. It is highly desirable to keep the temperature of each component temperature within a specified range, in order to maintain stable long term performance. In view of this, real-time calculation of temperature for an SOC has become an essential aspect of power management for SOCs. This calculation uses power information collected during normal operation from various functional elements of the SOC to estimate the dynamic temperature of each functional element in a central micro-controller. For this calculation, the SOC is considered as a plurality of thermal entities (TE for short), wherein a TE is the basic unit of temperature analysis. To perform a real time temperature calculation for an area of the SOC, a central micro-controller known in the art needs the power consumption of the area of the SOC and the thermal transfer coefficients from the area to each other area of the SOC. In other words, in the art, the area of the SOC from which power consumption data is collected is the same as the area of the SOC for which thermal transfer coefficients to each other area are determined.
For accuracy of a temperature calculation at a fine grained level, a TE may be defined for each functional element with a minimum or greater power consumption. However, doing so may cause the definition of a large number of TEs, i.e., about one per functional element. Because a real time temperature calculation at the level of one TE per functional element requires both the power consumption of each functional element and the thermal transfer coefficients between every pair of functional elements, and the number of pairs of functional elements is a triangular number based on the number of functional elements (e.g., for 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 . . . functional elements, there are 1, 3, 6, 10, 15 . . . pairs), a large increase in the number of TEs incurs excessive resources to implement and execute real time temperature calculations.